Hi,
>Can anyone shed light on this, or tell me if it's a common thing (oc, most of us don't just turn the computer off, but I know it happens other times, w/no such disaster).

a few things you can do to minimize urgent situations:

make an image just of the boot disk

if you still have a bootable floppy, create one with
ntldr
ntdetect.com
ntbootdd.sys (if you need it, if not in root no SCSI)
Boot.Ini

and the other hidden files.

If you want to start other OS', get those start files as well.

The floppy boots, ntloader shows boot.ini and everything accessible
on the disk should load. That's the fastest way.

Other options are to recreate the boot sector via
linux,
XP's recovery console
some of the boot CD's (current trend in german pc magazines <g>)

or the hard way:
create another install of NT/W2K/XP and stop when the new boot.ini is shown.
delete the other files, fix the entires in boot.ini and off you go.

Just for safety, I keep my active partion as FAT 16 and install the OS
to D: or E: in NTFS. Then I can work on C: with all the old and safe tools.

HTH

thomas